Bernard Meadows

Taranman, London
Philip & Muriel Berman, Pennsylvania (acquired from the above in February 1983. Sold: Sotheby's, New York, 13th September 2005, lot 130)
Private Collection, Germany (purchased at the above sale)
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2012

Venice, XXXII Biennale, British Pavilion, 1964 with British Council Tour to Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Moderna Galerija, Zagreb; Kunstamt Reinickendorf, Berlin; Museen der Stadt, Recklinghausen & Kunstverein, Braunschweig 

Alan Bowness, Bernard Meadows: Sculpture and Drawing, London, 1995, no. 86, illustration of another cast pl. 50

Large Standing Armed Figure was created by Bernard Meadows in 1962 at a time of transition in his art. Trained as an artist at the Norwich School of Art and as Henry Moore’s assistant before and immediately after the Second World War, Meadows later established himself as a distinctly modern sculptor working against the smooth, refined style of his former employer. In the 1940s and 50s Meadows engaged in animalistic subjects, primarily birds and crustacea, which possessed disturbing, somewhat aggressive qualities but in the 1960s he re-introduced the human figure into his work. Large Standing Armed Figure, with its imposing scale and roughly-hewn surface shows Meadows ability to render the human figure simultaneously as aggressor and victim. A key protagonist of the post-war movement labelled by Herbert Read as the ‘geometry of fear’, Meadow’s work encapsulated the expressionist sensibilities of his contemporaries, such as Lynn Chadwick, Kenneth Armitage, Eduardo Paolozzi and Geoffrey Clarke, who are all represented in this exhibition.